Chicago's Newberry Library has created a Web site to help you with place-based research of your Windy City ancestors.

ChicagoAncestors.org is a searchable interactive mapping site. Type in an address, and you’ll get a map showing the location, along with nearby churches, sites of crimes and more. Roll over the map markers for each place to see data such as addresses, date and type of crime, associated library resources or links to online images. (The data come from sites such as Homicide in Chicago and Jazz Age Chicago.)

There's also a keyword search box, Type in St. Thomas, and you’ll see locations of churches with that name.

You’ll want to read the search tips. You need to use address conversion tools for addresses before 1909, and leave off street descriptors such as Ave. or Rd. For example, I entered 137 DeKoven St., which is where Mrs. O’Leary (whose cow did not start the Chicago Fire) lived in 1871, and got nothing. But after downloading the 1909 street number conversion book (under Tools) as a large PDF, I looked up the address, searched on 558 Dekoven, and got my map.

Wondering if Mrs. O’Leary might’ve attended nearby St. Wenceslaus church, I clicked on its name and got its years in organization and a list of its available records at the Family History Library.

Registered ChicagoAncestors.org users can click to add their own comments to map points or map their own genealogical information and save it to their profile.

Click Tools to get street guides, more maps and other useful links; and click What’s New for updates from the Webmasters.

Here, Mrs. O'Leary's address is the blue star, and the yellow dot is the site of nearby criminal activity.

The office transferred handwritten documents recording the legal status of 56 African-American slaves to the Senator John Heinz History Center. The oldest papers date to 1792, the year Peter Cosco purchased his freedom from John McKee for 100 pounds.

The history center will make the papers available to researchers in its library and online.

Synium software has released MacFamilyTree 5, promising a speedier database engine and redesigned user interface. It also integrates a Web hosting service so registered customers can upload their family trees in HTML format for free.

The program is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard). Download it for $49 or pay $25 to upgrade.

The report’s conclusion is "yes," and it urges all states to follow the eight (Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon and Tennessee) that already allow adults who were adopted to access their original birth records. The institute found that in states with open records, “most birthparents and adoptees handle any contact with maturity and respect.”

For many genealogists, an adopted parent or grandparent presents a research brick wall. According to the report, some states have restored access more narrowly, “typically to individuals who were adopted prior to the state's law sealing this information.”

Each letter is accompanied by a little background about the writer. You also can view photos from the front and read or watch interviews with service members.

“My father was a very patriotic man,” says Rose Young, an Army nurse who was at the Battle of the Bulge. “My brother enlisted in service first, and [my father] was proud to have a son, but how many men had a daughter that went away? So he puffed his chest all the time about the fact that he had a daughter in service.”

What a great way for students to learn about history and research, and what a great site for you to peruse.

I learned about this cool resource for British ancestors from the ResearchBuzz newsletter about online search engines and databases:

A new Web site provides historical admission record transcriptions from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

The free Small and Special database contains information on more than 85,000 patient admissions from the hospital’s opening in February 1852, through 1914.

You can do a simple search on a name and birth year (exact or choose a range) on the home page. Or, click Search on the left of the page to search on other parameters such as patient’s address, admission date and disease.

Results show the patient’s name, age and address; illness, outcome (such as “died” or “relieved”), admission and discharge dates, and case notes (if any). You have to register with the site to see details such as case notes.

Under the left-hand Gallery link, you can browse photographs. Click Library to see articles about the hospital, staff, and patients such as little Minnie Ashman, who suffered from empyema.

Pennsylvanians are debating a public records law that could make their state the least transparent in the country.

HB 443 is an apparent attempt to bring public records law up-to-date, especially with respect to electronic records. This much-amended bill doesn’t, as some have reported, close all records with birth dates and addresses. Section 307, which lists records “deemed inaccessible,” makes an exception for personal information of deceased individuals:

“The exemption under this paragraph relating to the disclosure of an individual's home address shall not apply to … any former address of a deceased person. The exemption under this paragraph relating to the disclosure of an individual's birth date shall not apply to the birth date of a deceased person.”

Currently, Pennsylvania vital records from the past 100 years, stored at the Division of Vital Records, are off limits to all but immediate family. You can request birth and death records prior to 1906 from the county where the event was recorded.

But open-records advocates are denouncing HB 443 provisions that close much government agency correspondence and all government e-mail. That would make Pennsylvania the only state in the nation to take such a step. Other states are either explicitly opening e-mailed correspondence or they don't distinguish between electronic and paper records.

When I was growing up, I tagged along on trips to state archives and libraries while my mother and her sisters and mother were researching her family line. But my genealogy experience is limited to that and working here at Family Tree Magazine—which, let's face it, is probably the absolute best way to learn about tracing your family's history.

With every resource at my fingertips (namely, every Family Tree Magazine ever printed and our Ancestry.com access), I started to get curious about my Dad's side of the family. I know that most of my great-grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe, but it gets hazy from there.

My first step (and probably the easiest) was using Steve Morse's One-Step Search tools to see if I could find any of my great-grandparents on any passenger lists. After a brief period of believing my great-grandfather Stanley had changed his name from Wikenty after arriving, I realized that passenger records have two pages and saw that Wikenty was coming to stay with his brother Stanislaw—bingo. (Jumping to conclusions should be the cardinal sin of genealogy.)

And now I wait. With any luck, I'll soon (soon being a relative term) know the real birthdates and birthplaces of my great-grandparents and finally find out their parents' names. In the mean time, I'm really looking forward to the next time I see my grandparents—I have so many questions to ask.

You can pay $29.95 for a book of interesting facts, statistics and commentary about your surname, if it’s one of the 279,000 last names covered in the series. That accounts for nearly 90 percent of US households.

The books' content is based on Ancestry.com’s historical records, but
don't expect to find information about any particular family.

It's
more along the lines of the “Did you know?” tidbits that pop up when you
search Ancestry.com. For example, I’ll look for census records of my
great-grandfather and learn “Most Haddad families (47) living in the US
in 1920 lived in CT.”

According to the Our Name in History description for a book about my
surname (4,872nd most common, says the census bureau), “You'll get a better idea of where people sharing the Haddad name
settled and where they may reside today in the United States, Canada,
England and other countries.”

If you’re running out of time to pull together those impressive genealogy books you planned on giving relatives for the holidays, one of these surname books could be a somewhat-paler-but-still-sort-of-related-to-family-history substitute.